The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. There's still time (to 31 March ) to enter a dataset in the 2020 Darwin Core Million, and by way of encouragement I'll celebrate here the best and worst Darwin Core datasets I've seen. The two best are real stand-outs because both are collections of IPT resources rather than one-off wonders. The first is published by the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University.

Last week (25-26 February) I was in London for CISCO Pit Stop event. Thursday evening was at the Natural History Museum where I gave a talk extolling the virtues of linking stuff together: My slides are here: Cisco Digital Catapult from Roderic Page Friday we assembled at the Digital Catapult Centre, which as Sandy Knapp notes, has some amazing views from it's 9th floor.

Anyone care to remember how awful and unusable the web interface for accessing the NHM’s specimen records used to be? Behold the horror below as it was in 2013, or visit the Web Archive to see just how bad it was. It’s not even the ‘look’ of it that was the major problem – it was more that it simply wouldn’t return results for many searches. No one I know actually used that web interface because of these issues.

One reason I'm excited by the launch of the NHM data portal is that it opens up opportunities to link publications about specimens i the NHM to the record of the specimens themselves.

The Natural History Museum has released their data portal (http://data.nhm.ac.uk/). As of now it contains 2,439,827 of the Museum's 80 million specimens, so it's still early days. I gather that soon this data will also appear in GBIF, ending the unfortunate situation where data from one of the premier natural history collections in the world was conspicuous by its absence.

Charles Davies Sherborn, the Natural History Museum's 'magpie with a card-index mind’ Next month I'll be speaking in London at The Natural History Museum at a one day event Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond.

Here's the video of my talk at the NHM (courtesy of Vince Smith). Going Digital - by Rod Page from Vince Smith on Vimeo.

Busy day yesterday, giving two talks, one at The Natural History Museum, one at the British Library. Slides for the NHM talk are below.

Vince Smith has produced a nice flyer for my forthcoming talk at The Natural History Museum on March 17th (11-12). It will be a busy day as I'm also talking at the British Library in the evening (6pm - 8:30pm), for which Sarah Kemmitt has produced a flyer, and set up a discussion forum on Nature Network. With all this effort going into the artwork, I'd better actually come up with something useful to say.